Founding Director (in 1994) and Executive Director of the Children's Media Project, Maria Marewski is an award winning filmmaker who has taught at the University of Maryland, Hunter College, and Vassar College. She has presented at numerous national conferences (Grantmakers in the Arts, Coalition for Essential Schools, the National Media Education Conference) and has curated (since 1999) the Youth Media Program for The Hampton's International Film Festival.

Maria has served as a panelist or presenter for numerous committees, conferences and film festivals. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of The Poughkeepsie Institute, as well as our own Children's Media Project. As Executive Director, she is responsible for organization-wide leadership and direction, leading the Curriculum Development team, fund raising and general community outreach.

artist's statement

As a maker of images that incorporate movement, sound and time, I am drawn to the use of the medium of electronic media as a means to explore and express ideas that probe the nature of what is real. I am interested in discovering ways of articulating, through images and sounds, the idea that multiple states of awareness exist simultaneously and what traveling and communicating between various states of awareness might look like.

Although on a mass consciousness level we still function as if the world is mechanical, quantum physics confirms that there are multiple unseen levels of reality and that this reality is composed of particles and energy fields. Electronic media as a medium seems to lend itself naturally to this exploration; it, too, has made the transition from the mechanical film medium that can be touched and seen to the unseen electronic particles which cannot be seen and which somehow produce images and sounds under certain circumstances. Digital media offers the possibility for a language that is able to express ideas what cannot be expressed with linear, sequential tools.

In my first film I use still (family) photographs and manipulate them to tease out what else these photographs might be evidence of. There is the surface reality and then there is the emotional reality. This impulse and awareness (to articulate a hidden reality) comes out of the experience of what I call tribal pain. Having grown up as an immigrant child from German parents who were fleeing the aftermath of World War II (and experiences in Russian prison of war and concentration camps) each of my parents transmitted the (personal and collective) trauma to their children both by talking and selectively not talking about what happened. Children sense and children feel the amputated parts that hold the trauma. From this crack in the world, awareness is born.

Although I spent most of my life in America, I consider myself to be rooted in a Germanic tradition. I see especially my early work coming out of a German Expressionistic sensibility where the palette is dark and graphic, and where the hidden force behind reality is explored. Certainly my early subject matter of fascism, patriarchal family structure and fairy tales clearly reference Germanic traditions. My later work and ongoing storyboard explorations are rooted perhaps more in the magical realms of the Black Forest where I was born. Counterbalancing the dark stories of war and deprivation, my mother also infused our lives with magic through German fairy tales and frequent visits to our deeply wooded, moss banked stream where surely the little people and fairies lived and used the artifacts we made for them.

The electronic media arts permit the incorporation of multiple levels of perception (and expression): of what we see and hear, of a specific way of framing the subject, how long we look at it and in what sequence we see it. Theoretician and critic, Andre Bazan, in discussing photography, which was in his time the newest form of what he call Mimetic art, understood that each technical advance in replicating reality actually frees the artist to me more abstract and interpretive. Digital media, especially, straddles this tension between being able to capture reality with increasingly accurate tools of documentation and being able to construct and manipulate fantasy realities. I am interested in exploring this intersection specifically with digital tools.

In my sample, I am showing examples of film and video, and storyboard collages, because they marks points in my artistic development that want to be further explored through digital media. When I began creating moving images, digital tools did not exist. In graduate school, where I focused on theory and criticism and then production, I was working with both 16mm and super 8 film formats. After I moved to New York City, I continued with both formats and also experimented with Fairlight (an early digital tool) through workshops and labs at Film Video Arts. I worked in galleried in both Washington, DC (Diane Brown Gallery) and NYC (Light Gallery and Robert Mann Gallery),w here I was exposed to a wide range of fine art photography which influenced my ideas about images. My Super 8 work, what I consider to be “moving still images,” was reviewed in the Independent film magazine and my 16mm film (made from still images), “In the Name of the Father,” was shown at the Joseph Papp Public Theater in NYC, and was awarded 2nd Place in the “Film as Art” category of the American Film and Video Festival. During this time, just as my first film was taking off, my first child was born and a year later our family moved to the Hudson Valley area where I subsequently founded the Children’s Media Project. Since that time, I have continued developing my thinking and experimenting with ways of making images that express ideas that interest me.

In the past I felt limited by making moving images through film and vide because my ability to manipulate the images was limited. Special effects were possible through film and video, but were not particularly accessible because of the expense or the complexity of the tools.